It’s not that well known a fact, but Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle started his career as a theater director, starting at Joint Stock (a company founded by writer David Hare and legendary director Max Stafford-Clark), before becoming a major figure at the Royal Court in London, along with directing several productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Now, fresh from his success with “Slumdog Millionaire,” the director is returning to the stage for the first time since he began his film career.
British paper The Daily Telegraph is reporting that the helmer — who’s about to direct Japanese-body-pillow-lover James Franco in “127 Hours” (the story of mountain climber Aron Ralston, who was trapped under a boulder and forced to amputate his own arm) — will direct a new version of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” at the Olivier Theater, the main house of London’s National Theater, at the end of next year.
The new version is written by Nick Dear, who adapted Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” into a BBC TV series in 1995, and will premiere sometime next winter. Sir Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, stated that Boyle would deliver a “Huge scale, theatrically and visually ambitious event for our main stage”, that would maintain the director’s “direct, personal style.”
The National tends to put on fairly exceptional work, but between this, and the future Mrs. Playlist Rebecca Hall appearing in “Twelfth Night” in the same season, it looks like it’ll be as good a season as they’ve ever done. We’re sure this’ll start speculation that Boyle may be behind a “Frankenstein” movie, but that’s not going to happen — from what Hytner tells The Telegraph, it sounds like a specifically theatrical idea, that Boyle’s been wanting to finish for some time.
Not even Boyle’s once-proposed idea to do a Solomon Grundy film (no, nothing like the D.C. Comics zombie-ish monster) sounds even remotely like this or even a way to exercises those ideas.
